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About 18 years ago I was hired to lead an Automation Development team for Lotus Notes and Domino. Near the end of the 1990’s, the Lotus Notes and Domino product had become so complex that a single code change in an obscure place in the code could negatively impact any numerous API’s or applications. The directive of the automation development team was simple – provide an automation framework for API and regression testing. At the time “test driven development” was not really a wide spread thing and developers hated writing unit tests. So the automation team had a single directive, automate the 20 million lines of code across 7 platforms after each build, every single day. The task was daunting but we saw an immediate improvement in quality in the first year alone, winning us an IBM Corporate Award.

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I was in a discussion the other day about automation, which in itself is an extremely broad term, but we were talking around quality assurance and the importance of having some kind of automated process when the “product” was ready. Whether this be spreadsheets, reports, commercial products, applications, system builds, etc. At some level you should have automation to verify that at least at a high level the product is consumable.

Test driven development and agile development have played a huge role in the quality of software over the past 10 years and it shocks me to know companies are simply not doing this today.

My side of the discussion was around the work I did when I joined Iris Associates – which changed to Lotus, then ultimately to IBM Collaboration Solutions. While this was around software quality, the story I was in discussion about was data integrity in spreadsheets. We had several layers of automation following a build. Once the build completed (on five different platforms) a series of automated tests were run for build verification. Once the automated tests ran there were some manual tests run if the automated tests had passed. We then had what we called “automated system tests”, also known as DNA (Domino Notes Automation). These tests were much more functional in nature and not at a single API level. So you can imagine these tests using many (if not hundreds or thousands of API’s) to complete what would normally be done by a human. I remember talking to a QA person about automating Event Admin (a Domino Server feature) and he said the hundred or so tests run by DNA would take me three months to do manually – and DNA did it in about 20 minutes – every day, on every build, on every platform. At the end of the day, and I am not sure of the exact number, but there were literally 10’s of thousands of tests run every single day on almost every single supported platform for both client and server. The results of the tests were of course published to a Lotus Notes database and notification emails were generated.

Why is this important?

So on any given day you could see exactly what and who broke the build. This was a huge leap forward in terms of quality because you no longer introduce a problem into the build and find out two months later during feature testing or even worse after the code is shipped. Resolution was often fast because we could isolate the exact submitted code from the ClearCase source control system.

Having a “clean” build meant any developer could synchronize the latest binaries and start work on “the next thing”. This allowed over 1200 developers to not be dependent on a single build model. A single build model is, we do builds on Fridays. That would mean if you wanted to start working on “the latest code” you would have to wait until Friday or use last Friday’s build. Over time this could kill a development cycle, especially if Friday’s build was bad. And remember, if you do builds once a week that’s 1200 developers checking code in every day – unchecked. By the time Friday roles around you may have merge conflicts and even worse – run time conflicts.

Today, much of this is done in the form of Unit Tests – like JUnit or our custom internal unit test suite called DLLTest for C/C++. Many members on my team had patents around this process and some of the small utilities we wrote in order to accomplish this. See below for the two patents I received for my automation work.

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I was doing my casual nightly reading and stumbled across Hudson. Continuous integration is something I am very familiar with. My early years at Iris Associates were the test automation lead for Lotus Notes/Domino. We essentially built an internal tool that is very similar to Hudson. We used a combination of cross platform C/C++, Lotus Notes, Lotus Script and Java in the entire architecture. It was a pretty robust and complex system and much of it is still in use today for automation testing of the product. Our tools helped developers test code in side packs and quickly find regressions with thousands of unit tests. People who do not work on very large teams or with a large source base may not appreciate such a test tool. The problem with Lotus Notes/Domino is it is a very mature product that runs on many platforms so a single change in one low level area could have mass impacts or even worse, a subtle impact in some obtuse area that is rarely visited. This is why a product like Hudson is needed for these kinds of projects – and in my mind, for all projects. It is no secret that test driven development is a key success factor for many products today. So if you are not at this level then you should check out Hudson, it looks very promising.

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Many Lotus customers (and Lotus itself) use Rational Functional Tester(RFT) and in many ways RFT does a great job and in many ways it can be just too much for what you need to do. If you want to integrate UI testing into your unit testing you might want to check out SWTBot. I have recently started looking at SWTBot with a serious eye. I plan on playing around with it for our own team use and I also have some team members looking into it to automate their areas. I would like to get some feedback from the blogosphere and find out if anyone has actually used this or has integrated it into their ant scripts. The site has a lot of good pages and articles to get you started running pretty quickly. I think since its Java/Eclipse based it plays well into the “test driven development” model many companies are moving towards and should feel so daunting to a developer.